Meta Neo Post Modern No More: Version Numbers for Movements

What software can teach manifesto writers.

I was inspired by some recent calls, including the excellent Ted Gioia¹ for an influx of Romanticism, a neo (fresh and new) romanticism.

We could call it New Romanticism, but that has already been done more than once. We can’t rob Duran Duran and Culture Club of their label!

I don’t think that is completely what Ted Gioia had in mind..

I was excited by the concept of an influx of appreciation of nature, a push back against industrialization, and a drive to including right brain creativity and aesthetics in people’s values. It was more exciting that the announcement of a newly discovered Spandau Ballet album. It reminded me and connects to a parallel academic invocation of this era as characterized by a response to post modernism, labeled metamodernism.²

Post modernism is of course a response to modernism and a silly word. Modernism, a label for art and culture from roughly the first half of the 20th century, had the guile or ignorance to rob the language of a word that from Latin has meant "the current point in time" for a couple millenia. When in the company of pasty academics (and me), modernism describes an artistic movement centered 100 years ago. Now that modernism’s time has past, we are past the current point in time. It is awkward. I conscientiously use "contemporary" to tiptoe around the gasping hulk that is my dear friend modernism.

Each successive movement after the strange ignorance or ego of the label Modernism must, in order to be a flow or response from the previous, further toy with the word that used to mean "the present time." I mean, Fukuyama did not declare The End of History until '92, decidedly post modern.³

Post modern is its own funny, being "after the present time." It is a hard word to parse, unless you are in Club Let's Label Art and Culture, in which case you are probably pasty and sad (or me) and people tune you out at parties.

Now meta⁴ gets its turn.

These movements are not usually named contemporaneously. The pasty and sad academics do that later. But, the artists tend to sense that they have started doing something new. That's when the manifestos come out. They state boldly:

> "I had an artistic impulse that felt powerful true and make stuff that others will look directly at, then at a cafe I met someone who was doing something else and attempted to explain it in a way that makes sense to me, so we are a movement and here is our manifesto for your reference."

Modernism was assigned that awkward name well into the movement. I am not clear on whether Romanticism or realism were even named in time for their adherents to be aware that they were in a movement. A shame.

What we need is to create a more neutral method for naming these events, and something that helps the pale and sad maintain our attention just a bit longer when we meet them socially.

Software has taught us a lot about how to do stupid things quickly and confidently. How about versioning for our arts movements?

As updates to software are released, they are tracked by a reassuring mathematical notation: major version-dot-minor version. So when a little thing happens, the application label goes from Death Ray v2.5 to Death Ray v2.6. When the Death Ray gets a major update, such as the ability to select the colors of the death ray using hex code, It would be announced as Death Ray v3.

Art movements could use the same linear method.

Perhaps we could have a single vast codebase with a shared version: Art v172.5? Or break it out, label everything, and give it a version. Likely there will be multiple projects; I expect that once they have had that conversation in the cafe and found that they are in fact A Movement that requires A Manifesto, folks will need to make a whole new app instead of contributing to an existing app .

We can manage that!

LInux, a grandaddy of software, functions with its own version, and then portions of it have versions of their own. As of this writing, the latest Linux kernel is version 5.19.17 while the most recent version of Sudo, used to give users rights within Linux, is 1.9.15p.

Perhaps there could be a collective art version and then folks can increment their own daemon as needed, or install a new one.

Open Source and other software disciplines do run into confusions and sticking points about whether something should be a major or minor version, but guidelines help. As an initial draft, I suggest that major versions kick in based on

* Number of manifestos generated

* Amount of interdisciplinary cafe meetings or

* It started in Paris. Because its Paris.

Inevitably, just as in software, we will produce major versions just for marketing purposes. Its just fine! Ego is an important part of producing art, but meantime we can find you where you are. Feel free to be Modernism 6.0 instead of 5.4. The human mind prefers stories to memorizing numbers so feel free to add a brand name as Microsoft has done. Modernism XP or Modernism Saddleback Edition. In the release notes, it will still be v6.2.

Should the process take hold, perhaps we could move on to politics, where every side feels regularly robbed of their movement name by the other. Instead of liberalism and neo liberalism and libertarian liberalism, we can delineate version numbers. I can’t believe it will quiet the arguments, but at least it will be less confusing.

This could be not only a useful way of locating and cataloging all art, it will preserve the language for use outside of manifestos. Without clarity, academic conversation about art movements sound inaccessible to normal people and normal people can't make out what academics are talking about. We wouldn't want that.

Let's hurry, before there are Neo New Post Contemporaries out there making it even harder to speak about this week's menu at the local bakery without accidentally invoking someone’s manifesto.

1. This warming article by the excellent Ted Gioia among them. [https://www.honest-broker.com/p/notes-toward-a-new-romanticism

2. Nice video intro to the idea of metamodernism:

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

4. A bit of latin that I struggle to spontaneously define. Something like "outside but relevant" or "I see stuff you don’t.”